Last year a nightmare, this year a blessing for Kutztown grad

Jennifer Sommers of Stroudsburg, shown with her twin brother, Tim, underwent surgery for her stroke at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia

Jennifer Sommers of Stroudsburg, shown with her twin brother, Tim, underwent surgery for her stroke at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (KUTZTOWN UNIVERSITY, CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

Last Christmas Day, Jennifer Sommers was unconscious in a hospital bed, her brain swollen, a machine helping her breathe. Her stunned family surrounded her in prayer.

A week earlier, the 22-year-old Stroudsburg woman had abruptly gone from a bright and vivacious preschool teacher to a comatose stroke victim in danger of death.

If she lived, which was very much in doubt early on, she might never be the same again, and that would have been a loss for people far beyond her family. Sommers was supposed to graduate in the spring from Kutztown University and embark on a career in special education, inspired in part by her experience helping to care for her mentally disabled older sister, Lindsay.

Would Jennifer become like Lindsay, in need of constant care?

Well, no. This is a Christmas story, after all, though it would also make do as an Easter story, because it touches on the theme of resurrection.

In any event, this Christmas is far different from last Christmas, because Jennifer Sommers is once again a bright and vivacious preschool teacher, except she is 23 now and, three weeks ago, accomplished something no one could reasonably have expected after the stroke.

She graduated.

It seemed like the flu

For months after the stroke, Sommers couldn't communicate or remember much of anything. Moments after finishing breakfast, she couldn't remember what she ate.

Now she tells her story in a rush, almost as if she were making up for all the months when she couldn't speak at all, or suffered the tear-inducing frustration of trying to find the right word and falling ever short.

It began innocuously.

"A few days into [winter break] I was working at my local day care and the director said I seemed to be getting sick," she said. "I thought it might be the flu. I threw up."

Somehow — she has pieced much of the story together from the accounts of other people, since she remembers nothing — she wove her way across Main Street, Stroudsburg's busiest thoroughfare, to her house.

She made it to the bathroom. That's where her boyfriend, Andrew Miller, found her when he stopped by after hours of trying to reach her by phone and text. She was unconscious and covered in vomit.

Miller didn't wait for an ambulance. He hauled Sommers to his car and raced to the hospital, where physicians diagnosed a drug overdose.

Sommers' mother, Sanke, was angry that anyone suggested her daughter was on drugs.

She's not a drug user, she told them. It isn't drugs.

A CT scan revealed the problem: multiple clots in a cerebral vein. They were blocking blood that was supposed to be flowing out of Sommers' brain; the result was dangerous swelling. It's called an ischemic stroke, as opposed to a hemorrhagic stroke in which a blood vessel ruptures.

"They told my mom they were going to let it play its course," Sommers said.

That meant treatment with anticoagulants, but Sommers was in such dire shape, the family demanded more. So, before long, Sommers was on a medical helicopter on the way to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. A specialist there concluded she needed surgery immediately.

It's easy these days to take for granted what doctors can do, as the development of miraculous technologies outpaces our capacity for wonder. So it's worth thinking twice about the extraordinary nature of what happened next: The surgeon inserted a hair-thin catheter into Sommers' leg, threaded it to the blocked vein and broke up the clots.

Her blood starting flowing normally again. But she was far from cured.

A playing card remembered

Imagine a dream that lasts for weeks: a stretch of strange and elusive mental imagery, upside-down logic, anxiety and bewilderment.

This is what confronted Sommers when she began to emerge from the depths of her crisis. Looking back at that time now, she remembers snatches of things, but they have no context and little meaning.

"I don't remember anything from the hospital," she said. "I do remember a snowstorm. I was at Andrew's house."

Miller had stayed at the hospital the whole time — 10 days, including Christmas, when he drove to Maryland to see his family, stayed two hours and came back.

After New Year's Day, Sommers was weaned off the ventilator and began the arduous process of rehabilitation — physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy.

She went home, where she was tended by her mother; her older sister, Heather Taliaferro; and her twin brother, Tim, who was supposed to graduate alongside his sister in the spring but had gone to commencement alone.

Sommers' therapy continued under the direction of her older brother, Michael, who had just become a chiropractor.

"I was his first real patient," she said.

Michael, who lives in Vermont, said he marveled at his sister's progress. To improve her short-term memory, he would show her playing cards, then ask later what they were.

She could never remember. But one day in March, just three months after the stroke, Sommers was strengthening her legs on a treadmill when her brother flashed a card.

A few moments later he asked what it was. She remembered.

"He got so excited and I got so excited," she said. "I started crying."

Michael said his sister's sheer will in climbing back from the effects of the stroke was extraordinary. The remaining signs that anything was ever wrong — say, brief memory lapses — are subtle.

Jennifer, he said, "is like an angel. She's probably the most giving and caring person I've ever met. … If you didn't know her before, you might not know what she went through."

Sommers acknowledged her inborn stubbornness was undoubtedly key to her comeback.

"I hate having people do things for me," she said. "Even going down the stairs, people would try to help me. I would say, 'Let me do it!' "

When the stroke happened, Sommers had completed her elementary education course work at Kutztown and needed only to finish a course of student teaching to earn her degree.

Kutztown helped her find a position relatively close to Stroudsburg, in the Bangor Area School District, and she completed the requirement in the fall.

On Dec. 13, in the O'Pake Fieldhouse at Kutztown, she received her diploma. Today, she is working at a day care again and applying for special education teaching positions in the area.

The stroke, it turned out, was drug-related after all, though the drug wasn't illicit. Sommers used prescription birth control pills. She wasn't a smoker, which increases the possibility of strokes in women who use the pill, but it happened anyway.

"That one thing was a game-changer," Michael said. "A life-changer."

Today, Sommers' family will gather for Christmas in Stroudsburg. They will undoubtedly talk a great deal about last Christmas — not the darkness of that time, but the light that shines now.